ALL JAPAN ON NTV

March 25, 1990 (taped 3/24/90)

Samson Fuyuki . . . puts on a great performance as a plunky and sympathetic underdog.

Yoshiaki Yatsu . . . takes All Japan’s hot new foreigner tag champ and roughs him up a bit.

Dan Spivey . . . fulfills the oh-so-important role of ‘Generic White Guy Teamed with Stan Hansen.’

GENICHIRO TENRYU/TOSHIAKI KAWADA/SAMSON FUYUKI vs. GREAT KABUKI/MIGHTY INOUE/SHINNICHI NAKANO

This isn’t anything amazing, but what’s shown here is a fun little clip. Fuyuki takes an errant chair shot from Tenryu during a scrum on the floor and gets busted open, and damn if Nakano and Inoue aren’t a couple of stupendous dicks by taking advantage and working over the cut. Tenryu gets fed up and tries to help but when the ref puts him out, it gives Kabuki a chance to stroll in and take his own free shot at Fuyuki. Fuyuki doesn’t get much to do other than bleed and sell, but he does it for all he’s worth. At one point, Nakano grabs him by the hair and the pained desperate look on his face honestly doesn’t look all that far away from Ricky Morton, Kabuki puts him in a Boston crab and he flails and acts like he’s about to be broken in half.

Once Fuyuki tags out the match levels off quite a bit. There’s no shortage of action or intensity, but there’s no more sense of story. It seems odd that after a brief spell, Kawada tags Fuyuki back in, especially with Tenryu right there, and it’s disappointing that he seems to have already recovered a good bit. But after another brawl we finally get Tenryu legal in the match, and he dishes out the hate and stiffness that we’ve come to expect. Tenryu gets knocked back into the corner by Kabuki and inadvertently tags Fuyuki back in, leading to he and Nakano working a decent finish. ***

STEVE WILLIAMS vs. YOSHIAKI YATSU

This was worlds more fun that it probably had any right to be. It starts off crazy, with Yatsu jumping Doc at the bell and brawling on the floor. Yatsu puts on a headlock and runs Doc into the post, a sequence which almost always ends with the guy on offense getting shoved into the post, but Yatsu actually pulls it off, and it leads to Yatsu letting loose an onslaught of headbutts. We also see both men put their amateur and mat skills to use, including Yatsu doing some damage to Doc’s leg (with Doc doing a great sell job of it), and Doc needing to take down Yatsu and punish him on the mat to take over, because he could barely hobble around. But Doc also shows exactly how much he’s got left when Yatsu covers and Doc easily shoves him right off.

Once Doc takes over after this point the match kind of falls apart, as they don’t seem to know where else to go with things. Yatsu does a bulldog and then Doc counters a second one into a backdrop suplex, which leads Yatsu to roll to the floor and they have another little scrum with Doc getting a chair involved. Yatsu tries to pull a fast one and sneak up on Doc while the ref has his attention, but instead of going back to the leg, he tries a German suplex and Doc blocks it. Instead, Yatsu has to try a simple roll up, which Doc easily escapes and that seemed to be all that Yatsu had left in him. Doc gets back to his feet, drops a few elbows and hits the Stampede to end it. It’s not very long and it’s more fun than it is good but given the choice between two surly tough guys going apeshit on each other or Doc trying to paralyze Kobashi with crazy ass suplexes, I’ll take this any day of the week.

JUMBO TSURUTA/AKIRA TAUE vs. STAN HANSEN/DAN SPIVEY

Other than Jumbo and Hansen being ready to pick right up where things left off in the aftermath of the tag title change earlier in the month, there isn’t a whole lot to this. It’s a perfectly serviceable match, but there’s nothing all that outstanding about it. Spivey is pretty generic as a partner for Hansen; there’s nothing at all that separates him from the likes of Randy Rose or Johnny Ace. Taue shows a couple of surprising things, like a running dropkick, and he goes along with Jumbo when working over Hansen’s arm early in the match, but he hadn’t turned the corner as a worker yet (not that this would have been the setting for that in the first place).

Hansen and Spivey working over Taue’s arm was decent filler for the last half of the match, but there wasn’t any sort of payoff to it. Taue makes a small comeback when Spivey misses a diving headbutt and rolls out some offense but runs into a big boot and a DDT from Spivey that draws in Jumbo to make the save, which is what leads to the finishing stretch. Taue takes a decent sized bump from the lariat, but his arm getting worked over had no impact at all on the finish. Jumbo and Hansen were the clear highlights here, and there wasn’t enough of them together to make this anything more than watchable.

Conclusion: Even with the main event not really delivering, this is still a solidly fun TV show.